WAITING FOR DENNIS : He Thought He had It All Wrapped Up as Ghostwriter for Dennis Hopper's Autobiography. But It All Ended in a Very Familar Place: Another Busted Hollywood Deal.

May 14, 1995|Richard Stayton | Richard Stayton's last article for the magazine was about playwright David Mamet.

It happens to all of us. At a party, across a crowded room, stands your former life. The woman who betrayed you. The man who broke every promise he ever made. You, the co-dependent in recovery, see the Significant Other who tormented and manipulated and consigned you to hell. In a single glance, countless therapy sessions vanish--nothing since has approached that relationship's intensity or promise.

It happened to me today. Only my self-destructive object of desire is Dennis Hopper. Yes, the actor notorious for playing psychopaths. That deranged fan in the Nike commercials who inexplicably stalks athletes and who unknowingly stalks me.

If it was simply just another self-destructive love affair, maybe it would be over. Certainly I believed it was. Until this afternoon. At the corner bookstore. There he is and he walks straight to me. "Hello, Richard. What have you been up to, man?"

I shake Hopper's hand, warning myself to beware the killer smile. Don't get hooked. Do look back. Do remember . . . It is May 15, 1985.

Hopper guides me up the stairs into his cramped studio. I look out over Venice. From his kitchen window, I can see my apartment.

"A lot of windows for a paranoiac," he jokes anxiously.

Everything about him is anxious. Every word appears to make him flinch. He picks up a hat with a logo: Alcoholism Renewal Unit. "This is where I was when the year began," he says, referring to a detox ward, and bravely laughs again.

This isn't just a has-been movie star, I realize, this is a man who has been institutionalized.

I vow to give this interview all day if necessary.

"Dennis Hopper in Conversation With Richard Stayton."

Above the newspaper's photograph of a suspicious-looking Hopper floats this quote: "It wasn't my liver, my kidneys and all that stuff that went. It was my mind." On the jump page is another: "I didn't consider myself an alcoholic, I just drank all day long."

The interview is reprinted globally.

My phone rings incessantly. Hollywood has rediscovered an improved, rehabilitated and provocative Dennis Hopper. Then 48, he was the rebellious contemporary of James Dean, Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison. But there is a difference. "I survived. Most didn't."

"Great piece," say television execs, who then ask: "How can we contact Dennis?" Hopper appears on news broadcasts, confessing his mental breakdowns, his straitjacket tours of psychiatric institutions, his drug addictions, his alcoholism and sobriety's salvation. He is back from the dead to testify. He's a born-again madman for the 1980s.

One week later, Hopper phones me at the Herald. "Hey, man, I can't tell you how happy I am with your article. Would you be interested in doing my book?"

Hopper claims that a writer from Rolling Stone has been selected to help him write his story. "But I don't trust this writer," he confides. "He doesn't know, you know? You caught my voice. You know art and artists. You're out of the '60s."